Artist, Writer

January 11, 2018January 11, 2018

Old adventures

With my condition I have had a lot of memory loss. It isn’t too bad but it can be confusing. Sometimes images can make old memories resurface or I may dream of places that seem familiar. What really surprised me recently was seeing some images from lostcollective.com and realising that there were memories leaking into some of my dreams. The old power plants in Sydney and other post industrial sites were scattered around Sydney and I would visit these sites. Sometimes I would video them or simply look around. I didn’t get very interesting footage to be honest. The places I visited when I had access to a video camera was when I was in University and the sites were close to where I was temporarily living. Some sites though I had forgotten. Mainly the control rooms of the old power stations. There were a few near Balmain. There was one very large site which I had visited a few times but it took the photos from lostcollective to make me realise that they were the places I was having recurring dreams about.

The dreams never made sense to me because I couldn’t really pinpoint if the place was real or had been real. That too was the driver of the dream. It was about not remembering. The dreams were about lost memories and funnily enough lost places which these sites became as they were developed. Finally this recurring dream made sense. I would always marvel at the technology from these places. They were so utopian and quite grand in scale and form. Technology in this case was far more interesting than the boring black box of a computer. In these dreams I marvelled at the hybrid technology that seemed to address current technologies lack of style and form. These computers I came across were modular but relied on so many parts with all sorts of manual inputs. Essentially these control rooms tucked into all sorts of corners and crannies and at times designed into a space made sense. To see those images I was taken back to those lost memories and lost places. I can’t really remember them but now I know they were in a way real. They were real places but had been lost in my mind.

One part of schizophrenia initially was of having been cast from the control room of my mind. Now I am steering the ship but there is a lot of places that I still can’t seem to access. But memories float through parts of my mind and in these dreams I am actually trying to remember if it was a real place or if I had imagined it. Sometimes I see the medication I take as a way of gaining access though I have the controls and there are parts that seem out of reach. It is the frustration of the trauma. It is a physical trauma as the brain is physical. Sometimes when I feel unwell it can be so physical. It can feel like I have been hit around the head. I hope one day I can get a lot of my memories back. They fade with age as well. Some of my mates remember stuff and I have no idea. It was good to see what these dreams were digging up. Old adventures.